World Gastroenterology Organisation Global Guidelines: Helicobacter pylori

ABSTRACT

Helicobacter pylori (Hp) continues to be a major health problem worldwide, causing considerable morbidity and mortality due to peptic ulcer disease and gastric cancer. The burden of disease falls disproportionately on less well-resourced populations. As with most infectious diseases, the greatest impact on reducing this burden comes from improvements in socioeconomic status, which interrupt transmission. This has been observed in many regions of the world, but the prevalence of infection remains high in many regions in which improvements in living standards are slow to occur. Meanwhile, the optimal clinical management and treatment pathways remain unsettled and are evolving with changing antimicrobial resistance patterns. Despite decades of research and clinical practice, major challenges remain. The quest for the most effective, safe, and simple therapy is still a major issue for clinicians. An effective vaccine also still appears to be elusive. Clinical guidelines not infrequently proffer discordant advice. It is very difficult for guidelines to achieve relevance across a variety of populations with varying spectrums of disease, antimicrobial resistance rates, and vastly different resources. As local factors are central to determining the impact and management strategies for Hp infection, it is important for pathways to be based on the best available local knowledge, rather than solely extrapolated from guidelines formulated in other regions, which may be less applicable. To this end, this revision of the World Gastroenterology Organisation Hp guideline uses a "cascades" approach that seeks to summarize the principles of management and offer advice for pragmatic, relevant, and achievable diagnostic and treatment pathways based on established key treatment principles and using local knowledge and available resources to guide regional practice.